TY - JOUR
T1 - Women in interdisciplinary science
T2 - Exploring preferences and consequences
AU - Rhoten, Diana
AU - Pfirman, Stephanie
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. EREC-0355353 and Grant no. BCS-0129573 and NSF Cooperative Agreement SBE-0245014, ADVANCE at the Columbia Earth Institute.
PY - 2007/2
Y1 - 2007/2
N2 - For at least a decade, U.S. funding agencies and university campuses have promoted the expansion of interdisciplinary research. At the same time, federal and local programs have sought to increase the participation of women and minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering. Research has focused on each of these trends independently, but very few studies have considered their interaction by asking how intellectual preferences for and professional consequences of interdisciplinary science might be influenced by gender, race, and/or ethnicity. Focused specifically on gender, this paper considers the expectation that women will be more drawn to interdisciplinary research, and explores the learning styles, work preferences, and career behaviors that might anticipate and/or explicate gender differences in interdisciplinary science. Principal mechanisms by which researchers engage in interdisciplinarity - cross-fertilization, team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation - are tested for evidence of gendering using preliminary empirical data from three studies. The results of this exploratory analysis offer clues about possible tendencies and raise questions about the potential costs and benefits for those who adopt them.
AB - For at least a decade, U.S. funding agencies and university campuses have promoted the expansion of interdisciplinary research. At the same time, federal and local programs have sought to increase the participation of women and minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering. Research has focused on each of these trends independently, but very few studies have considered their interaction by asking how intellectual preferences for and professional consequences of interdisciplinary science might be influenced by gender, race, and/or ethnicity. Focused specifically on gender, this paper considers the expectation that women will be more drawn to interdisciplinary research, and explores the learning styles, work preferences, and career behaviors that might anticipate and/or explicate gender differences in interdisciplinary science. Principal mechanisms by which researchers engage in interdisciplinarity - cross-fertilization, team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation - are tested for evidence of gendering using preliminary empirical data from three studies. The results of this exploratory analysis offer clues about possible tendencies and raise questions about the potential costs and benefits for those who adopt them.
KW - Gender
KW - Interdisciplinary science
KW - Knowledge production
KW - Reform
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U2 - 10.1016/j.respol.2006.08.001
DO - 10.1016/j.respol.2006.08.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33846190178
SN - 0048-7333
VL - 36
SP - 56
EP - 75
JO - Research Policy
JF - Research Policy
IS - 1
ER -